eight year-old. He looks more uncertain than I feel.
‘Hello. Yes it is. And you are?’
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Your name? What is your name?’
‘Dennis, sir.’
‘OK Dennis. Come in and take a seat.’
He pulls one of the swimmers into the pool, just as a procession of little people comes through the door. I stand back and wait for them to choose their seats. Once they’ve sat, put their pads and pencil cases on the tables I start.
‘Good morning. I’m your new teacher.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Does anyone want to ask me any questions?’
Dennis puts his hand up. I nod for him to go ahead.
‘What does “fuck” mean, sir?’
‘Time isn’t successive.’
‘Explain, please.’ I place a little pebble in her navel. It fits almost perfectly.
‘I mean this moment doesn’t follow the previous and doesn’t precede the next.’ She lifts her head up and holds her sunglasses above her eyes for a moment, inspecting the jewel in her tummy button. ‘You want me to belly dance?’
‘Later maybe. So how does time work in your highly superior mind then?’
She replaces her sunglasses and rests her head back on the pillow made of her clothes.
‘Everything is side by side. Now is next to my birth and your birth and Napoleon’s birth and Hiroshima and Christopher Columbus taking his first poo in the New World and the moment I said time isn’t successive.’
I suck the pebble out of her and spit it onto the beach. It bounces off a stone and then another and settles into its own little crevice. I dig a little hole in the beach next to us and find a smaller one. This drops neatly into the oval dip in her stomach.
‘Humans have created the concept of time moving forward, but it’s never really been seen or proved. We could have taken another concept on board just as easily.’
‘Perhaps we haven’t, because other concepts are wrong.’ My finger traces a circle around the grey gem in its pink setting and her stomach quivers.
‘Einstein didn’t believe it.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s right.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but all right.’ She sits up and my pebble disappears in the fold of her stomach, ‘Look at this beach.’
I look. It’s packed. Little children run in and out of the waves where the sand is just making an appearance at low tide. Groups of foreign students show off their continental tans and husbands stare from behind sunglasses at breasts of Scandinavian-looking girls who light cigarettes and glance sideways at Italian boys. The pier is cooling its front legs in the water, skin peeling and old frame creaking.
‘How many pebbles?’ she asks, using her sunglasses to hold her hair back.
‘Seventy-two billion, three hundred and twenty-three thousand and four.’ My eyes scan the length of the beach again. ‘Maybe five.’
‘Exactly. And they all sit next to each other going off in every direction. Now imagine that each pebble is a moment in time.’
I realise this is going to be an explanation that requires attention. I sit up and adjust my position so I’m sitting comfortably.
‘Right, now watch.’ She picks up a stone and drops it. ‘This is now.’ She picks up the stone next to it, it drops. ‘This is now.’ She does it again.’ This is now.’ She does it again. ‘This is now.’
I consider not interrupting just to see how many times she’s going to do it, but my question wants to be heard.
‘So where is yesterday?’
She picks up the stone next to the one she’s just dropped.
‘Napoleon’s birth?’
She picks up the next, drops it.
‘Or maybe,’ she turns around, crawls up the sloping beach two feet and picks up a stone from there, ‘maybe this one.’
I look at her bottom raised in the air towards me. One half of her bikini is being eaten by it, exposing a pale half-moon of flesh. It contrasts to the golden brown of the rest of her. I think about biting the over-exposed backside. As a small boy with ice cream dripping off his mouth and hands is watching us, I decide it’s probably best not to.
‘The point,’ she says, as she slides back down onto her towel, her feet prodding my chest as she moves, making me back away, ‘is that I could move the pebbles around, or maybe they get kicked about or the sea jostles them about, and all those little moments get jumbled up and suddenly this moment isn’t next to the moment it preceded or succeeded and suddenly, whoosh.’ Her hand slices the air.
‘Whoosh?’
‘One moment we’re on the beach and the next moment we’re watching Napoleon pop out of his mum’s cannon, and the next we’re back on the beach. Time gets jumbled.’
‘Don’t you think if that was possible, more people would have experienced it? More people would be having glimpses of the past and the future?’ I grab her red-painted toes and want them between my teeth, ice-cream-covered boy watching or not. I suddenly have a hunger. She yanks her foot away.
‘Perhaps they have or perhaps the moment is so quick we don’t notice it. How long is a moment, how long is now?’
‘You’re a head fuck.’
‘I’m going for a swim. I need to think about if what I just said makes sense.’
She stands and pulls her bikini out of her cheeks, lays her shades on her towel, leans down and kisses me.
‘I love you,’ she says and tiptoes across the little hard and uncomfortable moments of time to the water.
I hold a stone in each hand and decide the one in my left is now and the one in my right is next month, when she plans to pack up and move to Prague for nine months. I put now in my bag, hidden under my jeans, and weigh up next month. It’s heavy and misshapen and feels wrong, so I throw it and just miss a dog chasing a Frisbee.
VISAS AND VINYL
W e’re sitting in Mei’s bar. Seven of us around pushed-together tables. It’s Thursday evening and the first week is over. Mei is perched on a stool behind the counter, smiling at no one. She’s Chinese and doesn’t say much. She only comes out from her smiling place to clear bottles away and to deliver a full one to a Canadian with big glasses at the table next to ours. He stares at Mei almost without pause. The rest of us help ourselves to bottles of Bintang beer from the fridge when we like. She makes a little note on the piles of paper in front of her
